Bugger, it seems my summer depression is encroaching

MOAN MOAN MOAN.

A whinge about depression and being scared after the courtesy, “Read More”.

Edit:  Have just had the thought that I am about 100% better than I was five years ago, so maybe I should be more optimistic about my chances.  Even if I am struggling I am better and stronger and wiser than I was.  And at least I know what I’m dealing with these days.  So that’s good.

I’ve had quite a weird week in terms of my mood.  I had a couple of funny days in which I was a bit wired but today I feel quite bad and feel that I could quite cheerfully throw myself in front of a train.  It’s not even out of any great sadness, just a total inability to live with myself, who I hate, hate to the ends of the earth with a special loathing.  I hate who I am, everything about who and what I am.  Of course, this venomous self pitying self hatred has the wonderful effect of actively making people dislike me and not want to be around me.  So I get lonely,  bitch about it and myself and make people feel uncomfortable and helpless and then I find I am actually alone.

Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.  I am aware that a shitty mood does cloud my thinking and makes everything seem crap.

In the past few months I’ve suffered from hypomania more than depression- I spent nearly all of April and May in a hypomanic episode tinged with that irresistible violent despair that so often comes with my “up side” (how spitefully I spit those words out).  Throughout June, I held it together for the most part but I’ve been aware that my mind is slipping somewhat.  I’ve felt the tremors (the yellow minute before the wind walks, as Yer Woman would say- beginning to become tired easily, wanting to drink and drink, and that strange, emotional disconnection that my mind seems to do in order to cut my ties and affections with the world, so that I can leave it).   It’s as though someone is slowly and subtly turning out the lights in my mind.  It’s getting a little bit darker every day.

I am quite scared.  I don’t like to say, “Ah, the summer’s a write off” because then it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy.   But summers have always been terrible for me.  Some people get depressed in the winter, but summer seems to be my dangerous month.  For the past three years, by October, I’ve either tried to top myself or ended up in hospital or with the Crisis Team.  It’s also turned dysphoric mania-y before and bled into losing touch with reality.  My mind casts itself back to sitting with the psychiatrist in near-silence, too tired, too dispirited, too utterly hopeless to really say anything.  I remember how completely hollow yet heavy I felt, how much of a collasal effort it was to even lift my arm to scratch my face.

Before I was getting any help, I spent most summers either completely and utterly gone in psychosis or locked up in my room and staying there for the next six months.  (See also my near-catatonic episode of depression when I was a teenager.  Barely moved, washed or ate for about six months, and hardly ever talked).

This year, I will most likely be alone most of the time, as opposed to before when I’ve had someone with me almost constantly.  So that will be a new and, for me, a rather frightening experience because although I become “unreachable”, I am somewhat safer with someone else around, and someone hugging me at least made me feel that I was still somewhere on this earth.  I can’t actually ask people to be with me and help me, because it is too much to ask from anyone, and only something you can ask of people who love you, and I’m not sure anyone does.  That isn’t a dig at anyone, I know some people like me enough, and care about me a lot, but I don’t think I am loved.   And Rob having to look after me was something that, in my mind, eroded our boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, even though he did it out of love.  I felt like I was ruining his life and that he was only thirty and any future he had with me would be defined by having to look after me, or living in fear, or being unable to cope anymore, having been through so much, spent so much energy, watching me lose my mind again and again.  I can’t burden people like that again.  (What a great attitude I have.  And I bitch about being lonely?!)

And I do need to learn how to manage alone.  When I’m depressed, I need help with some things like cleaning and so on, or else everything gets into a state.  Occasionally I need actual help getting clean.  When I’m manic, I forget (or refuse) medication, I forget to eat or walk out on the road or wander off, so sometimes I also need help to keep safe.  But maybe that’s not so good, maybe I let myself get into the “sick role”, and by being alone I might be able to manage better, with time.  I viciously resent that I need help at all.

What also scares me is how little can be done for me in terms of depression, other than augmenting Seroquel, which has never really worked for me.  I can’t take antidepressants, as they have always been disastrous, and therapy doesn’t seem to be very helpful for me when I’m depressed like that.  I am slightly phobic of antidepressants because the times I’ve been on them, even with a mood stabiliser and antipsychotic, have sent me so scarily mental.  I vividly recall being at St Ann’s and seeing my CPN and feeling so enraged that I had to restrain myself from punching her in the face.

When I write things like this, I feel like I’m taking my illness too seriously.  I often feel that way when I’m at my appointments with my social worker, as if I am being dramatic or somehow over-stating the point.  As if I am not “that bad” so why am I even there, why am I even saying these things when there is little wrong with me?   I haven’t seen her in ages and sometimes I think that’s a good thing because occasionally I leave with the feeling that I’m just wasting people’s time because I’m not really ill, I’m just not doing something right, or moaning, or being self pitying.

And then I remember last year having fits on my floor and drifting in and out of unconsciousness, swimming in the contents of my own stomach, crying out for my dead dad.  But that was just a little thing, a little tiny thing.

Oh well.  One day at a time, a cliche, but it’s true I guess.  I won’t assume that just because I feel terrible today I will feel terrible tomorrow.  And I am trying to take care of myself but things like my motivation and so on are beginning to escape me.  I still haven’t cleaned my flat, I don’t have any shopping in whatsoever.  When I want something to eat I just go out and buy a sandwich, if I can be bothered.  But I am washing, dressing, keeping busy.  I’m doing that much, at least.